Fetch As Google Failed

Once upon a time, I got an email from Google recently saying that Fetch as Google was failing for ipstenu.org.

I eyed them like they had a fifth eye. I was on ipstenu.org. I was on halfelf.org. They were clearly wrong. So I went to Google Webmasters Tools and checked out what was going on. I had a whole page that said “Temporarily unreachable.” I gave it a day. Sometimes that’s just Google being weird. But no.

After cursing a little while, I turned off all the plugins on the site and switched to the default theme. And the fetch worked. So I turned them on one at a time until it stopped.

And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that even though it’s been ten years of WordPress, when someone asks you to make sure you go through the normal debugging steps, you do it.

• flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches.
• deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin (read “How to deactivate all plugins when you can’t log in to wp-admin” if you need help). Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems. Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old
• switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule out any theme-specific problems. If you can’t log in to change themes, you can remove the theme folders via FTP so the only one is `twentyfifteen`. That will force your site to use it.
• manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file of WP (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server. Read the Manual Update directions first.

So yes. Do try it.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

See Full Bio